


Pity and Self-Loathing

by PunishedPyotr



Series: &S-L [1]
Category: Brat'ya Karamazovy | Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Бесы | Demons - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Genre: Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Bad Sex, Implied/Referenced Abuse, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Post-Canon, reupload
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-09
Updated: 2018-01-09
Packaged: 2019-03-02 13:52:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13319514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunishedPyotr/pseuds/PunishedPyotr
Summary: Pyotr is a bitch.





	Pity and Self-Loathing

**Author's Note:**

> howdy everyone i'm pp! i'm aireyv's phantom, reuploading their fics with their tacit permission, starting with the oldest ones! since of course as soon as i saw they were being taken down, i rushed to snag them all myself just in case they needed me to do this! ;)  
> here, i'll just copy/paste their original author's note!!
> 
>  
> 
> _I wrote this back in, like, March '15. This is unedited from the original version._

Alyosha was used to crazy people. One only needed to look at his family to understand why; each of his brothers carried his own set of unresolvable issues, and Alyosha himself was no exception.

That being said, Alyosha had never known anyone as broken-down and self-destructive as Pyotr Verkhovensky. He was always distracted, rarely ate or slept, and was so recklessly aggressive that it was as though he wanted to die without stooping so low as to commit suicide - although there was little else he wouldn’t stoop so low as to do. Additionally, as Alyosha learned by living with him (as Pyotr had, apparently, no money and nowhere else to go), he was plagued by nightmares of some sort, was frequently forgetful, and strangely clingy.

Alyosha sometimes wondered how he got involved in all this. At first, and perhaps it was still true, he believed in the revolution that Pyotr promised they would bring about. But now it was more along the lines of, he pitied Pyotr and felt the need to take care of him, or at least keep an eye on him. Which was difficult. He would often disappear for days at a time without saying anything and, upon coming back, no matter what state he was in, would drag Alyosha to some meeting or other without offering any sort of explanation. One time he came back with his coat spattered with blood, but the only thing he had to say for himself was, “It’s not my blood, Karamazov, just ignore it.” Another time it _was_ his blood - he’d been grazed by a bullet while he was doing… something - but he just muttered something about having been through worse and attempted to leave again.

That time, Alyosha managed to get him to stay long enough to bandage the wound - only by pinning him to a chair, which Pyotr was increasingly uncomfortable with. It became obvious why when Alyosha removed Pyotr’s shirt (the scrape was on his arm, and looked much worse than it actually was): the whole of Pyotr’s chest and arms and probably his back and legs, too - Alyosha didn’t look - were covered in scars. Mostly round little cigarette burns and thin straight knife cuts and lacy irregular whipmarks, and around his wrists and elbows it looked as though his skin had been torn by something rough, rope most likely, and then didn’t or couldn’t heal cleanly; there were even words, for God’s sake, carved into his chest and ribs, that said things like “worthless” and “lunatic” and “cocksucker.”

It would be better, Alyosha thought, not to comment. He cleaned and dressed the wound in silence, trying not to wonder whose cock Pyotr had been sucking, while Pyotr glared at the opposite wall, jaw set. Once Alyosha was done, he hurriedly redressed and hissed, “Don’t ever speak of this to anyone. If you do, I swear you’ll regret it, Karamazov,” and stalked out of the room before Alyosha had a chance to respond.

He didn’t come back for two nights, but Alyosha found him sleeping fitfully on the couch the morning after that.

Alyosha was tempted to lift his shirt just to see if he had hallucinated the whole thing, and was about to decide whether or not to do it when he noticed that Pyotr’s sleeve had been incidentally pushed up. Looking closely, Alyosha saw sure enough the rough pattern of the rope scar on his thin wrist. So it was true, Alyosha thought, stepping back and grabbing a chair. He was hoping that when Pyotr said not to speak of this to anyone, he wasn’t counting himself among the ‘anyone.’

Pyotr wasn’t pleased to wake up to Alyosha, sitting in a chair by his makeshift bed, with an expectant look on his face. He sighed deeply, almost exaggeratedly. “What do you want, Alexey Fyodorovitch?”

“I just wanted to ask about…”

Pyotr rolled over, turning his back to him pointedly. “I told you not to speak of it.”

“Who was it, then?”

Pyotr was a little surprised not only by the sudden directness of the question, but also by Alyosha’s inexplicable persistence. “…why do you want to know?”

“I want to know if that’s where you keep disappearing to.”

Pyotr sat up with a dry laugh. “Never mind where I keep disappearing to, Karamazov. Tell me,” he gestured to his torso, “did anything look fresh to you?”

Alyosha hesitated. “No, they all looked - perhaps a year old or so…?”

Pyotr nodded slowly, like he had just finished explaining something simple to a particularly stupid child. “It was before I met you, Karamazov, so it’s none of your business.”

Alyosha eyed him suspiciously for a moment, then said quietly, “Was it that Nikolay Vsevolodovitch man?”

In an instant, Pyotr’s hands were around Alyosha’s throat, squeezing and digging his nails in, almost before he realized it. “Where did you hear that name?!” Pyotr demanded, oblivious to Alyosha’s flailing, desperate attempts to push him off. “Tell me!”

Belatedly, Pyotr realized that Alyosha needed to breathe to speak and backed off. Alyosha fell off his chair, coughing and wheezing and weakly rasping an answer at length, “You talk in your sleep every so often… only ever about him.” He looked up with streaming eyes, rubbing his neck pathetically. He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, then said innocently (or rather with feigned innocence - Alyosha could pretend all he wanted, but he had never been innocent), “Pyotr Stepanovitch, your face is turning red.”

Hotly, Pyotr clapped his hands to his cheeks. “I told you, Alexey Fyodorovitch, it’s none of your concern!”

Alyosha got up and crossed his arms. “If you’re going to throttle me over it, then I deserve an explanation, Verkhovensky.” He shrugged. “Although I suppose if you’re so opposed to me being involved in your life, I might as well go back home…”

It was a dirty trick and Alyosha felt bad using it, but whenever he threatened to leave Pyotr would inevitably do anything to make him stay. He was apologizing now, although every apology gave the impression of being dragged out of him along a length of barbed wire. He knew why this was, of course, some half-mad thing about 'Ivan the Tsarevitch’, and the fact that people from all walks of life were naturally drawn to Alyosha - but it hadn’t really occurred to him until now to wonder about the history of his role in the revolution.

“Pyotr Stepanovitch,” he softly interrupted him, “who was… who occupied my 'role’ before I did? You’ve tried this once before, haven’t you?”

Pyotr fell silent, his fingers compulsively twitching. Alyosha grimly put one hand on the door; the fact that Pyotr typically treated him like absolute garbage didn’t, he felt, absolve him of yanking his chain this way. But this seemed necessary, somehow.

“Damn it,” Pyotr growled like a wounded animal, sinking back onto the couch. “Damn it, Karamazov. …sit down, I’ll tell you everything, or at least what I can.”

* * *

Life was better before.

That was the summation of everything Pyotr had told Alyosha. Well, the term 'everything’ was a loose one. There seemed to be many things that Pyotr had forgotten, mostly - no, all had to do with Nikolay Vsevolodovitch Stavrogin. Alyosha was right when he guessed that Stavrogin was the one who had given Pyotr his scars. He didn’t quite understand, of course, how Pyotr could have been so in love - was still so in sick, desperate love - with someone who had hurt him. And not just physically: now that Alyosha had seen a part of the physical scars, even once, he understood where the mental scars had come from. Naturally, Pyotr downplayed everything, insisting that it hadn’t been as bad as Alyosha thought, and even if it _had_ been Pyotr had deserved it anyway, and Stavrogin was allowed to do whatever he liked, especially with Pyotr - honestly, his increasingly circular excuses took up the bulk of his little talk with Alyosha. By the time they were done, Alyosha somehow understood Pyotr even less than he already did, and, although he did not know it yet, he was to be consumed by Pyotr’s past, haunted forever by his second-hand ghosts - or, just one in particular: from that day forth, it seemed Alyosha would never be able to stop thinking about Stavrogin.

* * *

While Alyosha had always suspected that Pyotr was emotionally reliant on him, at least in some strange way, it was a bit more obvious now that Pyotr had given up on keeping secrets from Alyosha (almost every day Pyotr found an excuse to complain about the present) - of course, some things Alyosha had yet to hear, like why exactly Pyotr was here instead of wherever Stavrogin was (he had only heard of a vaguely described crime) and, anyway, what exactly had happened to Stavrogin? But still, nothing really seemed to change besides that. Pyotr still found every opportunity to criticize, insult, or threaten Alyosha when in private (never in public - as far as the public was concerned, Alyosha was someone to be admired, worshipped even, which Pyotr openly encouraged and honestly had come up with in the first place) except now he compared him unfavorably to people he used to know. Mostly Stavrogin. Always Stavrogin. Nikolay Vsevolodovitch this, Nikolay Vsevolodovitch that.

“Pyotr Stepanovitch,” Alyosha interrupted one of Pyotr’s unending tirades, which he always patiently listened to whether he wanted to or not - Ivan could be blamed for this habit - “if you hate me so much, why don’t you just go find someone else?”

This threw Pyotr enough of a loop that almost three seconds passed before he had an answer. “There aren’t very many people like you, Alexey Fyodorovitch.”

“People like me?”

“Of course. Charismatic, you know - people are drawn to you. And - and-” he paused to consider something, “somehow… simple-hearted, naïve. The kind of person who could - get away with anything, you see.”

“…I see,” Alyosha said, “and what makes you think I have these qualities, anyway? What if I don’t?”

“You do,” Pyotr said authoritatively, then said further after another moment passed, “actually, Alexey Fyodorovitch, you remind me of him.”

There was no need to ask who 'he’ was. Alyosha was taken aback. “I’m like… him?”

“You’re nothing like him,” Pyotr snapped.

“…and that’s why you hate me.”

“Don’t ask questions if you don’t want the answer, Karamazov.”

A quiet moment passed. “What happened to him, anyway?” Alyosha asked tentatively.

Pyotr turned away. Alyosha thought he wasn’t going to answer until he said, “he… died. He hung himself.”

“Oh.”

Alyosha didn’t know what else to say. Pyotr turned back to him with a rueful smile. “Why do you think I came back to Russia at all? I ought to be far, far away. I may be wanted for murder, you know.”

“Murder!” Although Alyosha wasn’t really surprised…

Pyotr shrugged nonchalantly. “He had it coming, anyway. Besides, wasn’t your brother also a murderer?”

“…half-brother,” Alyosha said. There was no point in asking what that had to do with anything; Pyotr would just call him pedantic again.

And so the days went. Everything was normal, as far as two men - one of whom (okay, both of whom) was vaguely insane - planning an equally vague (as far as Alyosha was concerned) revolution could go. Admittedly, it got increasingly tense, but Alyosha elected to ignore it.

And then the tension snapped, and Pyotr attempted to rape Alyosha.

It was rather late one night, after a meeting that they had both attended (Alyosha had gone under his own suggestion this time, not Pyotr’s). There was nothing really out of the ordinary - no warning signs - except that Pyotr seemed even more highly-strung than usual lately. They returned to their little flat (that Alyosha and his inheritance paid for) in silence; Pyotr was distracted, and Alyosha pensive. They went inside and Alyosha had just finished shrugging out of his overcoat when he suddenly found himself pinned against the wall; it was so sudden, so unexpected that it was a moment before Alyosha fully registered that Pyotr’s thigh was painfully pressed against his crotch.

“Verkhovensky, what are you-”

“Don’t talk.” He forced a hand over Alyosha’s mouth, the other hand tearing at his clothes. Instinctively, Alyosha bit him, hard enough to draw blood, and, when he jerked his wounded hand back, grabbed both his wrists tightly and roughly shoved him to the floor.

“Verkhovensky,” Alyosha gasped, confused and upset, “what the hell?” Panicking, he impulsively kicked Pyotr when he tried to get up. He cried out, quickly stifled his voice, and curled up, clutching his bitten hand tightly to himself. “What the hell?” Alyosha muttered to himself, and, bewildered and feeling somehow guilty, crouched down next to Pyotr.

“Just leave,” Pyotr said in a low voice. “Just… go. Let me alone.”

“What is wrong with you?” It was half accusation, half empathetic sincerity.

“…no matter what I do, you could never bring him back,” Pyotr muttered, mostly to himself, “he’s gone, he’s gone and you can take his role and we can… but…” A broken sob escaped his throat and he held his hands, trembling, up to his mouth. Alyosha gingerly placed a hand on Pyotr’s shoulder - he jumped as if struck. “I can’t make it on my own,” he stammered desperately. “Oh, God, oh, Nikolay Vsevolodovitch…”

Filled with some sort of pity - some lustful sort of pity - and disregarding the attempted assault of a few minutes ago, Alyosha leaned down to kiss Pyotr’s lips. Pyotr moved his head at the last minute, looking away shamefully, and the kiss landed instead on the edge of Pyotr’s jaw. Might as well go with it, Alyosha thought, trailing kisses down Pyotr’s jaw, sliding his hand off Pyotr’s shoulder, down his arm, holding his hand and noting how his fingers shook. Pyotr made a confused sort of whimper as Alyosha began kissing and licking and sucking his neck; the whimper turned into a moan when Alyosha gently, self-consciously, experimentally pressed his teeth into skin.

“A-Alexey Fyodorovitch, what are you doing?” Pyotr whispered urgently, shifting away from Alyosha.

“Same thing you just tried to do to me,” Alyosha mumbled against Pyotr’s neck, and began fumbling with the buttons on his waistcoat.

Pyotr was silent and still for a full minute (how unusual for him!) before he began assisting Alyosha with the removal of various articles of clothing. “We shouldn’t…” he started.

“I know,” Alyosha said and gave Pyotr’s neck a quick, clumsy bite. God, what had happened to him? Didn’t he used to be a monk?

“I mean,” Pyotr said unsteadily, “not on the floor.”

“Oh. Right.”

They didn’t make it to the bed; by the time they made it to the couch they were both wearing only their pants, other clothes scattered all over the floor. Pyotr was panting, eyes unfocused, alternating between murmuring Alyosha’s name and Stavrogin’s. Alyosha was feeling drawn, conflicted, guilty; he had no idea what he was doing but he knew it was wrong, that this was somehow taking advantage of Pyotr’s perpetually fragile mental state, but he was hopelessly enticed, entranced by Pyotr’s despair and his docility, too, and the way he reacted, shivering and arching his back, as Alyosha ran his hands down his body, feeling each of his scars, wishing that just by touching them he could make them go away and erase, forever, Stavrogin from Pyotr’s past, present, future and every waking and sleeping moment - and Pyotr would be Alyosha’s and Alyosha’s alone.

Except that wasn’t right either.

“What am I doing?” Alyosha sighed, leaning his forehead against Pyotr’s shoulder.

“What? What did you think you’re doing?” Pyotr snapped, suddenly irritated now that Alyosha had broken the illusion.

“I don’t know,” Alyosha said, sitting up and moving away from Pyotr. “I don’t know, I - I can’t do this, Pyotr Stepanovitch.” Although at this point his arousal was hard to ignore, and he suspected that it would be even worse for Pyotr’s mental state….

Hence the way Pyotr suddenly clung to him, almost angry, grinding desperately against Alyosha’s leg. “No, no, no,” he gasped, his grip painfully tight on Alyosha’s arms, “you can’t bring me this far and then abandon me!”

“Abandon you?” Alyosha said, confused. It was hard to focus right now. “No, I just, I just - didn’t want to… take advantage of you.”

“Take advantage of me, dammit.” Alyosha obliged him. He had no idea what was going on anymore, and hadn’t ever since they had returned to their flat. Especially now that Pyotr was muttering, “You’re terrible at this.”

Alyosha sighed, pulling his lips back from Pyotr’s collarbone. “Do you want this or not, Verkhovensky?”

Pyotr stared vaguely at the other side of the room. “…of course I do. It’s just…”

“I’m not Stavrogin?”

“You aren’t even _close_ ,” Pyotr said through bared teeth, “you’re too gentle and boring and I can’t do with that, Alexey Fyodorovitch, I can’t do with that all, and moreover you clearly have _no_ idea what you’re doing, and I don’t mean morally-”

“What do you expect?” Alyosha said mildly, “it’s my first time.”

“…with a man?”

“In general.”

There was a long pause. Pyotr settled uncomfortably into the sofa, still under Alyosha.

“And you, exactly?” Alyosha said, just for the sake of conversation, if that was even appropriate right now.

“…my first time with someone other than Nikolay Vsevolodovitch,” Pyotr mumbled eventually, then added proudly, “I’ve never cheated on him.”

Alyosha stared at him for a long moment then sighed and returned his attention to his hands, which by now were down Pyotr’s pants. He wasn’t going to question Pyotr’s logic on why, exactly, Alyosha didn’t count. It was probably… safer that way, for both of them.

“In all seriousness, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” Pyotr panted after another immeasurable stretch of time passed, “I must warn that if I’m, ahh, not restrained somehow, I won’t be able to…”

“I-I understand,” Alyosha said quickly, “…I don’t have any rope or, um-”

“Oh, for the love of-” Pyotr groaned irritably, “just use a belt or, or, your hands will do fine, Alexey Fyodorovitch.”

Alyosha leaned dangerously off the couch to grab his belt off the floor, muttering, “I think I could do better things with my hands.”

“Do I have to talk you through the whole thing?” Pyotr asked sullenly as Alyosha fumbled with the belt, lashing Pyotr’s hands together behind his back.

“Probably,” Alyosha admitted.

“Fasten it tighter.”

“Won’t it be too tight…? If you cut off blood circulation, I think, it’ll-”

“It’ll hurt?” Pyotr scoffed. The effect was somewhat ruined by how red his cheeks were, which in Alyosha’s opinion was actually somewhat cute. “I know, Alexey Fyodorovitch. It’s supposed to. Fasten it tighter.”

Alyosha did as he asked, but only while protesting, “I don’t think sex is supposed to hurt.”

“It isn’t?” Pyotr sounded sincere. Alyosha gave him a worried look. “What?”

“Nevermind. Ah… now what?”

Pyotr sat up with difficulty, giving Alyosha another glare. “You’ve got this all out of order, you know.”

“I don’t know. You should have told me.”

Pyotr sighed, looked at the corner of the room again. “Take off your pants already, Karamazov.”

“Eh? Um…”

Pyotr looked him unabashedly in the eyes. “How do you expect to fuck me if I don’t suck your dick first?” The abrupt, shameless directness was a little much for Alyosha. “Are you _serious_ , Karamazov? You’ve already felt me up and half-stripped me and-”

“I get it, I get it,” Alyosha said, grimacing and blushing (even more than he already was), as he hurried to remove his pants. “Quiet down a minute, will you?” Pyotr rolled his eyes.

“One last thing-”

“Really?” Alyosha groaned. Was sex really this difficult, or was Pyotr just complicating things?

“Well,” Pyotr said stiffly, “since you already bound my hands, when you should have at least waited, like an idiot-”

“You could have warned me!”

“-that makes it your job to… oh, nevermind, forget it, Karamazov, just sit still,” he said, twisting awkwardly so that he could shove his hands down his pants at the same time as his face could be right near Alyosha’s mostly-hard dick. “Absolutely useless,” he grumbled, then put his mouth around Alyosha’s cock, which startled a short moan out of him.

It didn’t take Pyotr very long to get it good and wet, at which point he stopped, but to Alyosha it felt like an eternity of fantastic new sensations and incredible self-loathing. He had never felt anything like this before! Obviously. And it didn’t help that Pyotr, once he decided Alyosha had had enough, started complaining that Alyosha was “not nearly as big as Nikolay Vsevolodovitch, really, Karamazov, it’s absolutely pathetic. I hate it.”

“I think I liked it better when you were probably hallucinating Stavrogin,” Alyosha said. Pyotr bit his leg in retaliation, and Alyosha grabbed his hair and jerked his head up. That quieted him down a little.

“That’s better,” he said languidly, “be more like that, Alexey Fyodorovitch, be more like him…”

Alyosha blinked. He wondered if he had already passed to point of no return as he, like a man possessed, tugged Pyotr’s pants off, eliciting a small groan as he did so. He wasn’t surprised, but still saddened, to see that Pyotr’s legs were in a worse state than his arms; his inner thighs and hips, especially, looked as though they had been… minced? Truly, this was beyond the reach of similes.

“Just get it over with,” Pyotr moaned.

“…this was your idea,” Alyosha said under his breath. Still, he repositioned Pyotr - carefully, as he was close to falling off the couch himself - so he was on his back and Alyosha was more or less on top of him and pressed the tip of his dick against Pyotr’s now-available asshole, suddenly feeling very nervous. “…l-like this?”

“What are you waiting for?” Pyotr demanded, half-sitting up to glare at Alyosha. “Just do it. Surely you can manage that, Karamazov?”

Alyosha was about to say that he didn’t want to hurt Pyotr when he remembered that that was exactly what Pyotr wanted and he’d probably get yelled at again for hesitating. Thus, he only nodded before pressing forward, his mind going blank from the heat and the pressure and the… - it was almost too much. No wonder this is so frowned upon, Alyosha thought, feeling terribly lost in the moment, oh God, I’m going to Hell for this, aren’t I? He looked down at Pyotr spread, stretched lewdly beneath him and wondered if this was how Stavrogin felt: this heady realization that he could do anything, anything at all, and Pyotr would just lie there and take it… and ask for more?

Pyotr, for his part, only shuddered as Alyosha eased in, but within a few uneasy thrusts he was spreading his legs and panting, small noises that Stavrogin had always found irritating slipping past his lips. It’s been so long, Pyotr thought dazedly, suddenly unsure of how long it had been, exactly, even though his recollections of Stavrogin were almost too detailed; he threw his head back, moaning, when Alyosha hit his prostate (surely on accident), and his exposed neck must have looked inviting to Alyosha, who was kissing it again, and sucking, and nibbling, and just generally being boring. But it felt so good to have someone inside him again…

Alyosha clumsily grabbed at Pyotr’s cock, which was squashed between them, as he could not do it himself; Pyotr jerked and twitched, shivering, incessantly making sounds. Alyosha’s name was lost in the stream of “Nikolay Vsevolodovitch, Nikolay Vsevolodovitch, please, I love you, please…” and his eyes were closed, eyelids fluttering like he was trying very hard not to open them. Although it stung Alyosha’s ego a bit, that Pyotr was only doing this so he could remember his abuse at Stavrogin’s hands, Alyosha said nothing; in fact, the more Pyotr squirmed and sobbed, the sexier Alyosha found him. Admittedly, Pyotr’s legs were wrapped so tightly around his waist that it was getting kind of hard to breathe. But no matter.

Alyosha finished before Pyotr did, and inside him at that. Exhausted, he collapsed onto Pyotr, although he remembered to continue tugging on Pyotr’s dick, rougher than he intended, when Pyotr let out a breathy, impatient whine. He orgasmed a minute or so later, with a strangled cry and a shaking of his whole body. He sank back into the couch, finally relaxing fully, his expression far away, dreamy, and filled with infinite sorrow. “Nikolay Vsevolodovitch,” he breathed, then closed his eyes and waited for his heart-rate to return to normal. Alyosha pulled out, and drew away from Pyotr and started brushing the sweat out of his hair with his fingers.

“…are you alright?” he said finally.

“That was a mess,” Pyotr said without moving or even opening his eyes.

Alyosha sighed, looking across the room. Better than looking at Pyotr. “I know,” he said after a moment’s silence, awkwardly wiping Pyotr’s semen off his stomach.

“That was terrible and I hated it,” Pyotr declared, sitting up with difficulty. “I hate you, Karamazov. Why are you here?”

“On the couch with you, or in general?” Alyosha said, moving to unclasp the belt and getting his first glimpse of Pyotr’s back, which looked very much the same as his front except it favored whipmarks over cigarette burns and also had the words “Stavrogin was here” on the lower part of it. Very mature, Alyosha thought tiredly.

“You know what I mean, Alexey Fyodorovitch.”

“I really don’t, Pyotr Stepanovitch.”

Pyotr looked evasively to the side, frowning. “Is it pity? Is that it?”

Afraid of answering the truth - yes - Alyosha instead put his hands on Pyotr’s cheeks and gently pulled him into a kiss. His lips were dry and cracked and at some point he had bitten his lower lip so hard it had torn and the copper taste of blood was evident.

Pyotr went shock still for an instant, then jerked away so suddenly he almost fell off the couch. “What?” he said in stupefaction.

“What?”

“What was that?”

Alyosha stared at him. “…you’ve never been kissed before?”

Pyotr looked at him blankly. “No,” he said after a long while.

Alyosha looked up at the ceiling. If looking up represented Heaven, then he was sure he would not find Stavrogin there, but he had no other way of understanding.

“What are you looking at, Alexey Fyodorovitch?”

“Nevermind. I’m going to bed.”

* * *

Pyotr was gone when he woke up. He wasn’t surprised at all. He knew he would come back; he always did.

**Author's Note:**

> any and all comments will be forewarded to aireyv! i will either copy/paste their reply to me or they will reply on their own account! have a nice day!!! if you have any questions, just ask!!!!


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